Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday January 04, 2011 @09:56PM
from the expand-the-requirements dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."

But it isn't a given either that it will run on phones. They mentioned that there will be a new API for developing apps that can run on either, but there might be a new phone version coming out after Honeycomb that includes these improvements.

android 2.3 hold within it flags for larger screens then 2.2 and earlier had. This allows a app to load custom graphics and such for larger resolutions and screen dimensions, adapting to the larger surface area in the process.

Hell, there is a demo out there where webos adapts the interface of the email app as the screen size (browser window, as they where using chrome to demo it) changed. Basically it went from a single pane to a 3 pane as the available space got wider.

If Honeycomb were a tablet-only fork of Android, I don't think it would have been given a version name of "2.4" - i.e., the successor of 2.3, which we have on our phones. If it weren't a phone operating system, but a first release of a tablet-only system, it would have a different version number.

I'm not sure if that's in the best interest of tablet devices, which are generally used for basic content consumption (with light data input) or casual gaming.

It's not like you can swap out a motherboard/CPU/RAM and upgrade it incrementally (like the DIY PC crowd); the end user will constantly have to buy a whole new tablet in order to stay current with the next generation touch-OS.

Maybe that's the plan after all.. since it would be in the manufaturer's interest to make all of them all final devic

The source for this is a tablet maker claiming that its competitors' tablets won't be fast enough. So there's an obvious conflict of interest. And anyways, requiring a dual core processor doesn't make any sense; Google isn't stupid, they won't release something that's too slow for the majority of hardware already shipped.

To be able to use the market you just need an android device with a cellphone data connection, doesn't means google approve of the galaxy tab as being a suitable tablet device (in fact Google have stated that they do not consider the Galaxy Tab as being a tablet but a big phone).

Android has a HAL for GPU integration (we call it gralloc), Gingerbread brings incremental and concurrent GC in Dalvik, and the Gingerbread NDK provides for all-native development options, among other improvements. You're welcome.

OK, so maybe they will require a dual processor to run Honeycomb on a tablet device. I get that. In order for tablets to compete against iPad they must be smooth, super responsive and sharp looking. The extra processing power will help with that. I get it.

Now, lets think about the phone side of the fence. The current crop of 1Ghz processor equipped phones are pretty snappy and sharp. I have a Galaxy S phone, and although I had concerns at first about the battery performance, I don't now. But what a

That doesn't make sense. A single core.. guess what.. can be underclocked as well, and there's no second core to turn off, as it doesn't exists. In a perfect (and very simplified) world a single core CPU would use as much or less power than a multi-core of equal technology level.

However, ARM 9 multi-core CPUs are more power efficient - this means they are "faster" while using less energy than the ARM 8 generation (single core). So in practice, battery life depends on the implementation of the CPU, and ARM 9

Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9

Really? Because I'm fairly sure that the PandaBoard is shipping now (and has been for a little while) and includes a TI OMAP4430, a SoC that contains a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 at 1GHz, a PowerVR SGX530 GPU, and a few other things. I've not seen anything actually shipping that includes Tegra 2, although it's been coming Real Soon Now for a year or so.

Well hold on here, isn't Honeycomb supposed to be a tablet OS? And since dual core mobile processors are on their way, is it unreasonable to make them a requirement?

I mean, you can restrict yourself to the capabilities of an ARM11 based processor from six years ago but then all of the performance and technological gains since then would be completely wasted. And if such a processor is your target, don't use an OS made for more capable devices.

Google is trying to eliminate the fragmentation that everyone is complaining about, and also trying to reduce the crappy tablets out there giving Android a bad name.

By setting the minimum bar for Honeycomb at a dual-core A9 they can guarantee a certain experience and consistency for all the apps. They can probably also move to hardware acceleration for composite effects, which they can't do for all the Android cell phone hardware out there.

They would not do it by something as asinine as dictating the NUMBER OF CORES. They might put out a guideline about total CPU & GPU power recommended, however.

But do you really think their brand new Nexus S reference phone is going to be stuck on 2.3 because it is "only" one core? I seriously doubt it.

Finally, much of what makes most of the tablets out there crappy is just plain bad and cheap design and support. Slow CPU is not the highest on the list of what makes things like Pandigital "crappy". I

I thought having no single company control the whole product was supposed to be a good thing. Do you mean to say that there are advantages in having one company make both the hardware AND the software?

Step one: allow a million tablet devices to be released with AndroidStep two: Make a new version of Android for Tablets that runs on none of them and only on a new wave of tablets.Step three: Developer making tablet specific software now required to target two classes of devices.Step Four: Mu-ha-ha

So what are you to do now if you are an Android developer? Ignore millions of Galaxy Tab units sold?

I hate Apple... to prove it, I don't even run OS X on my Mac Book, I use Windows 7 instead. I have no idea how, but I was resolved not to own an iPad because tablets with telephone operating systems sound really stupid to me, yet, I was given an iPad against my will. I use it as a coffee cup saucer.Though, I love my iPhones. My daughter runs iOS 4 on her 3G, my son runs iOS 4 on his 3Gs and my wife and I both have iPhone 4s. They're great devices and the #1 reason I like them is that my daughter's iPhone 3

I'm not trying to troll but why doesn't iPad require to set a minimum bar of a dual core CPU? Ok they have one branch of OS and one manufacturer but the fact is, how would setting that minimum bar of dual core guarantee a certain experience and consistency of apps? Why not at 800MHz single core? Why not quad core?

They can probably also move to hardware acceleration for composite effects

They specifically want software compositing. I've even read threads where the core Android devs are flipped with a third party developer who didn't realize it was on purpose (as in a designed "feature") and even offered to re-write that portion of Android so as to allow for proper GPU sanity. The developer had even made some modest changes in his own code base which showed massive speed ups.

Even in recent reads, they show absolutely no sign of ever wanting to move away from software compositing. If they eve

Absolutely - this really kinda ticks me off - I just paid $600 for a tablet that has been effectively dead-ended. I wonder how many of the original customers they screwed on the first round will feel like bending over to take another jab when they fork out another $600 to upgrade their OS. What a freaking waste.

Why would this tick you off? Did the manufacturer promise you that Honeycomb would run on it? If so, then you have a right to complain. But realistically, you should buy a phone or tablet because of the features it has today, not because of the features it may have tomorrow or next week.

This whole "more features later" promise BS is how we got stuck with Patch Tuesdays. Microsoft sold us a buggy OS and we knew it was buggy, but we bought anyway, because of the promise that they would fix it later.

The expectation should be that your $600 tablet does, out-of-the-box, at least $600 worth of stuff. If it happens to run Honeycomb or some other OS later on, then that's a great bonus for you.

Agreed. Android has really dropped the ball on this one. Not supporting devices with new releases is just par for the course for android. Most phones are completely abandoned within a year of initial sale, and only months after they are no longer sold.

Half of the latest generation phones from last summer aren't even running 2.2 yet. Cyanogen was able to get that working on my G1 - there is no excuse that next-gen phones with several times the RAM/storage aren't running it. The vendors don't even have

Absolutely - this really kinda ticks me off - I just paid $600 for a tablet that has been effectively dead-ended. I wonder how many of the original customers they screwed on the first round will feel like bending over to take another jab when they fork out another $600 to upgrade their OS. What a freaking waste.

But Android is open source, isn't that the beauty of it? Also you'll still upgrade to Gingerbread and who knows if there'll be a 2.4 so it's hardly 'dead-ended'. I mean Honeycomb doesn't even have a release date yet!

Open source does you no good if your hardware is locked down so that you can't actually install anything. Also, just because a user community CAN exist doesn't release vendors from the responsibility to support their products. Imagine if Dell sold you a computer and two months later the next windows update didn't run on it? Do you think that they would say, "well, just keep running your unpatched version of windows - after all you bought it for what it did at the time, flaws and all."

I'm lusting after a small MeeGo-based device myself, but am rapidly losing hope that Nokia can be convinced to loosen their desperate clinging grip on Symbian long enough to put some actual effort into getting it into actual devices.

Android's okay (especially if one has a phone for which CyanogenMod is available and can get full root access), but I also would rather have a more traditional and complete Linux environment to play in on my portable devices.

It doesn't say it's a phone. It says it "supports phone functionality (as speaker phone, via provided wired ear piece or Bluetooth earpieces.)" Thats like claiming my laptop is a phone as it can do that too as either a speaker phone-only function or buying the extra bits. A phone has typically been something you can hold to your ear, but the Galaxy Tab isn't designed for such a functional use.

Heh, I use my tab as a phone everyday. And hold it right up to my ear like, "What?". I just run skype and google voice and away I go. The speaker at the bottom turned down is no louder than a phone earpiece and the mic is conveniently located right on the side. All this for 20 bucks a month for data and ~5 for skype number. And it makes a great machine to make posts on Slashdot talking about it to boot!

That's part of the appeal of the Tab. As far as I know, it's the very first device anywhere near the form factor of a phone that allows data without voice so affordably. I'm actually glad the US version doesn't have voice. If it did, the carriers would probably require it.

But is there a market for small handheld computers without cell phone capability? Google doesn't seem to think so...

Apple doing very well with the iPod touch proves there is a market. At first glance one would think that the competitive situation for portable phone-less versions of devices would be similar, but I see several large differences.

The iPod touch doesn't carry any AT&T-only disadvantage.The phone-less devices don't get subsidies.The phone-less devices would need retail distribution/space, probably a slower tougher task than working through the phone vendors.The iPod touch and iPad are already very well e

The phone-less devices would need retail distribution/space, probably a slower tougher task than working through the phone vendors.

In other words, unlike Archos and Samsung products, iPod touch rode the coattails of the click-wheel iPod products to establish space on retailers' shelves and a chance for end users to try before buying.

The iPod touch and iPad are already very well established with a robust well-integrated ecosystem for product, media, and app distribution

Is Android Market not "a robust well-integrated ecosystem"? If so, then why has Google been so slow to offer it on Android-based Wi-Fi tablets and media players that compete with Apple products?

Some devices are used without a net/data connection, not a situation where Google sells ads.

You know, Google can still sell ads for display on devices with intermittent net connections. It could download a

I think you need to look up Samsungs new Galaxy Player -- it has the full market and no cell phone capability.

I've heard good things about Galaxy Player, but I live in the United States, and I haven't seen one at Best Buy or Sears. On the other hand, Best Buy has a floor model of every iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Where can I try Galaxy Player?

No one (well, almost no one) seems to mind when a mobile OS requires a faster processor, but the number of cores is suddenly an issue. Wake up and smell the 21st century. The not-so-recent improvements in performance come from the number of cores and not the clock speed. And it looks like this is the way it's going to be for a while. Get used to it.

My point is that the performance requirement progression is pointless, useless, too fast, and stupid.

Why? We want more security, more stability, more responsiveness and more capability...these things don't come free. No-one's forcing you to upgrade so it's moving too fast for you then stick with what you've got.

Gingerbread is leaving behind almost every device already on the market.

That's a lot more forced progression than I'm used to seeing from any OS.

Well firstly it doesn't even have a release date yet and secondly of course at some point the OS will leave most existing devices behind, look at all the problems with the older iPhones running the latest OS, and the original 2G and early iPods don't get it at all. They want to start fresh to provid

Well, first, this is nothing new for Android. You could have bought an ADP from Google a week before the N1 was released, and I don't believe it ever received android v2. Ditto for any of the other 1st-gen android phones.

The only difference now is that a lot more people bought Droids, N1s, and Galaxies, and now they're feeling the pain that all the first-gen owners felt when their platforms came along.

I wouldn't throw stones at Apple though. While I prefer Android to iOS, the fact remains that Apple has

It doesn't seem right. It's just out of fucking line that a cellphone OS would require a dual-core processor. Somebody needs to trim some bloat.

That 'bloat' you speak of is 'applications' and people want to run applications on their devices. People want to run multiple applications on their devices simultaneously so naturally a multi-core CPU is the ideal choice.

It's funny how some people are so ignorant they just assume that because system requirements go up it means the software is wasting clock cycles. Do you think added stability, security and features all come with no computational cost?

I don't even see how this is possible. From a processor standpoint, a 1800MHz single core is *roughly* equivalent to a 900MHz dual core. TFA is claiming that Google cares about the chip and not the relative performance? That doesn't make sense.

I don't even see how this is possible. From a processor standpoint, a 1800MHz single core is *roughly* equivalent to a 900MHz dual core.

Probably going to get better battery life and responsiveness in multitasking since you'll spend less time context switching.

TFA is claiming that Google cares about the chip and not the relative performance? That doesn't make sense.

Getting the same performance for the same software out of different chips is very difficult even if they are capable of the same performance. Optimising for a particular instruction set? Optimising the scheduler and power management for multi-core CPUs?

I'm just surprised dual-core would be a requirement for any OS. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been an OS (apart perhaps from research OS'es) that require more than a single core.Sure, most OS's today can utilize a multitude of cores, but none of them actually need more than one.What is it in the architecture of Honeycomb that would necessitate two cores?

Are they saying it really requires dual cores to run, as in it just won't run on a single core (which sounds like an unholy level of bloat and some seriously bad programming), or are they saying that it requires dual cores in the same way PC software system requirements do, as in "dual core 1Ghz" is a rough estimate of the amount of processing power required to run smoothly?

The current crop of 1Ghz Android phones are every bit as fast and responsive as the iPhone4 (with it's 1Gz A4 CPU - essentially a custom Cortex-A8) so your fanbois argument just doesn't pass the smell test. Rumors are that the iPad2 and iPhone5 will ship with dual-code A4 cpus (based on the Cortex-A9), so if iOS and Objective-C are so much more efficient why does it need dual-core? It's needs it to compete against the flood of dual-core devices that will be coming in 2011 and it will need the horsepower to stave off the attack from Android which IMHO, has already surpased the iPhone in terms of features as well as usability (and I'm an iPhone user - for now).

Im not disagreeing with you, personally i don't really have an opinion on java performance as I rarely use it and where I see it is in places that you can't isolate Java as being the cause of a performance bottleneck. But it occurs to me that the linked article seems to compare message passing in objective-c to function calls in java, which isn't really a fair comparison and the overhead should be pretty low since the dynamic lookup should only occur once per method after which it should be a hash lookup, w

Java might be fast enough for your fancy calendar app, but seriously, we need to access NEON the SIMD ARM extensions directly on the CPU to get some decent speed, because the hardware itself is still slow even the A8 Cortex is far underpowered, and do not want to wait hundreds of cycles for Java binding to even start. Java is a nightmare to code mission critical real-time applications and professional grade games. Java should be optional, nobody serious would even consider it then. GC and "managed code" was

Unfortunately, large portions of iOS including libraries are ObjC so there is no getting around it.

As far as you objection to GC, that horse has already left the barn. GC is everywhere (.Net, JVM and in ObjC2). With multiple cores, incremental collection and other improvements in the GC algorithms the GC "pause" is hardly noticeable anymore. For truly time-critical portions of code there is the NDK. Besides, the JIT in android is fairly new and has a long way to go to catch up with that in a desktop/server

I was able to do just this at 15fps on the Nexus 1. Before the NDK had debugging I had to debug my code somehow, so I made a java version and ran that (since the code was almost identical). Now, the NDK code is faster, but then again that removes your argument since you can just use the NDK.

When you write an android app, it gets compiled into dalvik bytecode, and any android phone only has a dalvik virtual machine. The way the app runs on the phone has nothing to do with the actual java VM

Java SE embedded vs Android 2.2 [oracle.com].
Perhaps if Larry wins the court case against Android, Google will be forced to license Java and Android will finally get some decent performance by using Hotspot instead of Dalvik!:)
In any case, these dual core ARM machines are more than powerful enough to run the desktop version for light applications.